Artwork: Digital Collage
Title: Project People
Size: 91.44 cm x 60.96 cm Medium: Digital Manipulation (Adobe Photoshop CS6) Completion: September 12th, 2018 Project People is a digital collage made using Adobe Photoshop CS6 that symbolizes my treatment and acceptance of people who are stereotyped by their past choices and how there is good in anyone no matter what society thinks they are like. This piece was inspired by Salvador Dali's use of color and elongated figures in his pieces The Burning Giraffe and Woman with a Head of Roses.
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Inspiration
Salvador Dali was a surrealist painter and printmaker who was known for his explorations of subconscious imagery and its dream-like state. Dali's use of elongated, grotesque-looking figures is what inspired me the most for this piece. I agree with his ideology in the quote above which depicts the same ideology of the Surrealist Art Movement; the idea that as a society we are looking for concrete images, and that instead we should focus on the surreal and changing images like the ones in the movement.
In The Burning Giraffe, Dali uses the idea of crutches and drawers connecting to the woman in the piece to depict her reliability on man and that the true version of us is hidden inside our "drawers." Although the flowers in Woman with a Head of Roses were used to portray Dali's feelings towards rich people, I decided to mix his aspect of the drawers and their ideas with the idea of using flowers. Dali's use of color also inspired me. In both The Burning Giraffe, and Woman with a Head of Roses, Dali uses warmer or brighter colors to emphasize certain parts of the paintings (such as the burning giraffe in The Burning Giraffe) and muted, cool colors for other parts. |
"We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images" -Salvador Dali |
Meaning Behind the Piece
I have always considered myself a people person. Starting from my days preaching on the playground, I’ve had this unexplainable draw towards people no matter who they were or where they came from. Every person has a story full of different mistakes, choices, love, loss, emotions and memories. Many days I find myself studying people that I don’t even know on the bus, or even at school. You can learn a lot about a person by the little things they do. Most people don’t know I do this, and the awkward eye-contact that may follow can be unsettling sometimes, but it has definitely helped me to grow as a person and unintentionally help others to grow as well.
The subtle draw towards people has often led to me collecting a group of people that my mom likes to refer to as my “project people.” Generally the people in this group are ones that others don’t think of as great people and see as the mistakes or bad choices that they have already made in life, but I see past all that and try to find the greatest part of their soul. Even if the good in them is in the deepest parts of their heart, I will delve in and try to find it. No matter how grotesque, or monster-like their surface of their personality may seem, I believe there is always a better side to people and that everyone deserves the chance for someone to come around and care about them for who they are, not who they were. Even if they are struggling, a friend who cares wholly about them could be the thing that keeps them from the turning point that leads them down a shadowy path. That is why I liked the ideas and paintings of Salvador Dali.
Dali once said ““We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images”. He contrasted the ideas of the human expectations he mentions with his surrealist art, picturing elongated, unusual figures in his pieces “The Burning Giraffe and “Woman with a Head of Roses.” Using his style of elongated figures I wanted to emphasize the “concrete” images that people may see when they look at the “project people” in my life. The whole surrealist style of work was another thing I was inspired by. As someone who reads a lot of books, I loved the idea of taking what is considered the normal and changing into something that people are not used to seeing. For example, in my piece it features a tall, skeleton-like creature that is warped in a way that makes it seem unworldly and unusual. I wanted to use the images of myself and the flowers that are inside the skeleton in order to contrast the surrealist-style skeleton and infuse the idea that there is good inside everyone, but sometimes there needs to be someone in the world who is willing to search for it.
The subtle draw towards people has often led to me collecting a group of people that my mom likes to refer to as my “project people.” Generally the people in this group are ones that others don’t think of as great people and see as the mistakes or bad choices that they have already made in life, but I see past all that and try to find the greatest part of their soul. Even if the good in them is in the deepest parts of their heart, I will delve in and try to find it. No matter how grotesque, or monster-like their surface of their personality may seem, I believe there is always a better side to people and that everyone deserves the chance for someone to come around and care about them for who they are, not who they were. Even if they are struggling, a friend who cares wholly about them could be the thing that keeps them from the turning point that leads them down a shadowy path. That is why I liked the ideas and paintings of Salvador Dali.
Dali once said ““We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images”. He contrasted the ideas of the human expectations he mentions with his surrealist art, picturing elongated, unusual figures in his pieces “The Burning Giraffe and “Woman with a Head of Roses.” Using his style of elongated figures I wanted to emphasize the “concrete” images that people may see when they look at the “project people” in my life. The whole surrealist style of work was another thing I was inspired by. As someone who reads a lot of books, I loved the idea of taking what is considered the normal and changing into something that people are not used to seeing. For example, in my piece it features a tall, skeleton-like creature that is warped in a way that makes it seem unworldly and unusual. I wanted to use the images of myself and the flowers that are inside the skeleton in order to contrast the surrealist-style skeleton and infuse the idea that there is good inside everyone, but sometimes there needs to be someone in the world who is willing to search for it.
Planning
In the piece I was creating I wanted to use Dali's figures to get my idea across so I decided to do a warped, skeletal figure and use myself as a contrast to the figure. It took different ideas to try and figure out what I wanted each part to look like but I decided to go for the more monster-like features for the figure.
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Experimentation
I knew that I wanted to make myself hold the creature's hand put I wasn't sure how to position my body so I used my little sister and myself to figure out which position I liked best compared to the figure.
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I wasn't sure what flowers or positions they would need to be in so I experimented with different points of view of the flowers so I would have multiple pictures to chose from later on while creating the piece.
Once I started using Photoshop CS6, it took a lot of experimenting with the warp tool in order to get the skeleton to look exactly like I wanted it to. I also tried adding the spikes and the eye of the skeleton with a color similar to the actual color of the figure, but it didn't look right so I tried different colors until I settled on black. The black lines helped emphasize the figure the most and contrast it from the background of the piece.
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The placements of the flowers also took a lot of trial and error, especially the flowers in the chest. I had to try different methods and play with the transparency before it looked right to me. The background color was something that I didn't fully decide on till the end. At first I had a cityscape, then black, and then I went back to the cityscape because of how empty the piece looked
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Process
Then I used the warp tool in order to make the skeleton figure look more warped and elongated like the body parts in my planning sketches. I moved the skeleton in order to make it look as though I was holding onto it. In order to maintain balance within my piece, I positioned me and the figure in the center of the piece.
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Reflection
Compare & Contrast
Similarities
Differences
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CritiqueOverall I am very happy with how my piece turned out, especially for my first piece working on Photoshop. But, I feel like I could add more to the piece or make it feel less empty with all the extra space in the background of the piece. I also felt as though I could have come up with a different background to the piece but then felt that the cityscape within the piece helped to emphasize the piece and the figures that I had created.
While discussing with my group during critiques, they agreed that the colors and elongated figure reflected the work of Dali. The balance, lines, and colors used in my piece created a unity in which everything in the piece felt as though it belonged within the work despite the contrast in the hues of the figure and the flowers/my sweatshirt. |
ACT
Clearly explain how you are able to identify the cause effect relationship between your inspiration and its effect on your artwork?
Dali's dreamlike art and surreal scenes inspired me to create the elongated skeleton figure in my piece and use similar colors in the majority of my piece to make the scene feel more dreamlike. What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration? The author of the article Salvador Dali, The Burning Giraffe evaluates the meaning behind the dreamlike, surreal settings that Dali paints within his artwork. What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration? I concluded that Dali wanted to show the real world and its problems through his surreal images that he created and believed that his dreamlike scenes were the best way to convey his opinions and ideas. What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?. The central idea around my research was to pair the dreamlike fantasy with the views/opinions that people have of others before getting to see the real side of them. What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research? I was able to infer that the surrealism artists like Dali used their art in order to challenge the ideals of society and address the issues that they saw. |
BibliographyIngram, Tracy. “Flower Symbolism - The Meaning Behind Paintings of
Flowers.” Ezinearticles.com, 13 July 2010, ezinearticles.com/?Flower-Symbolism---The-Meaning-Behind-Paintings-of-Flowers&id=4656966. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Salvador Dalí.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 14 May 2018, www.britannica.com/biography/Salvador-Dali. Stanska, Zuzanna. “Salvador Dali, The Burning Giraffe.” DailyArtMagazine.com - Art History Stories, Daily Art Magazine, 6 Apr. 2018, www.dailyartmagazine.com/salvador-dali-the-burning-giraffe/. “Woman with Head of Roses.” Salvador Dalí's Biography | Gala - Salvador Dali Foundation, www.salvador-dali.org/en/artwork/catalogue-raisonne/1930-1939/411/woman-with-head-of-roses. |